Friday, 23 July 2010

ITO have released a new OSM Analysis service that gives an overview of OpenStreetMap completeness for Great Britain when compared to the Ordnance Survey's OS Locator product.

The results can be viewed both on a map and as a summary report; the map highlights discrepancies between the sources and the summary gives headline figures for each of the 400+ district/boroughs in Great Britain. The summary reports use OS Boundary-Line.

The service will be useful both to volunteer mappers who wish to improve the OpenStreetMap in their area and also to end-users who wish to know how good the data is for a particular area.

Here is the map view:

And here is part of the summary report which can be sorted in various ways.

If errors are found in the Ordnance Survey's data by a mapper, which do sometimes occur, then the special 'not:name' field in OpenStreetMap can be used to report this and the discrepancy will no longer appear in the above reports and mapping.

Information in the 'not:name' field can also be used by the Ordnance Survey to help them improve their data quality by giving them an addition source of possible errors to check.

This service has been developed by ITO with support from Ideas in Transit which is a 5 year research project funded by the UK Government in which both ITO and the Ordnance Survey are partners.